San Diego Opera has commissioned composer Jeffrey Rockwell to write a children's opera to be produced in city and county schools. "Rip Van Winkle" will augment the company's "Hansel and Gretel" educational program, where a professional team from San Diego Opera spends six weeks in residence at an elementary school to produce an opera by and for the students. Ian Campbell, the opera's general director, announced the commission Monday. The "Rip Van Winkle" project's first production will be in October at San Diego's O'Farrell School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

The show must go on. Five minutes into a Saturday matinee performance of the Venture Theatre's children's musical, it was clear something was amiss. There were puzzling silences and the dialogue had an ad-libbed quality. Director Gye di Capua stopped the show; the taped music wasn't working. The cast retired backstage for a fresh start. The audience was sympathetic; these things happen. They applauded. They waited. And waited. The music started. It stopped. Muffled exclamations were heard.

September 27, 1987 | FRANK RILEY, Riley is travel columnist for Los Angeles magazine and a regular contributor to this section

Hansel and Gretel could find a gingerbread house without a wicked witch on this Caribbean island, and that would be only the beginning of their discoveries. Not even the Brothers Grimm could have conceived a fairy tale in which two nations in this troubled world of the late 20th Century would have lived without border formalities for more than 300 years. When veterans are honored in the United States on Nov. 11, the day will be St.

As animation screenwriters with hundreds of scripts to our credit, as concerned parents with eight children between us, as former educators, and as former children, we extend a sincere thanks to Q5 for showing us the light. Before Q5, we stumbled along mindlessly in the dark, writing heartfelt, warm, loving stories based merely on experience, humor, observation and creativity. We foolishly thought that we could slide by. Now Q5 has shown us how to standardize, target, demographize and synthesize our work to a nice safe pablum.

As members of a support group for Step-Mothers, we take offense at your implication that the unpleasant things from nature are due to "stepmother nature" (Traveling in Style, Oct. 19, "Rainy Day Roving" by Marion Gough). Over the centuries stepmothers have been branded as wicked, cruel and insensitive (i.e., Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White, to name a few examples). Perhaps you are unaware of it, but today probably one-half of your female readers are stepmothers.

Don't expect a namby-pamby witch in "Hansel and Gretel" at the Assistance League Playhouse. When this cackling crone (played with great relish by Ottilie Laybourne) tells Hansel, "I'll have you for dinner, and that way your little sister can watch and weep," she sounds as if she means it. No wonder director Jon Peck gives audience members pre-show encouragement to boo and hiss (and cheer). Delighted, they take him at his word.

My hometown was a serious city, sadly bereft of architectural folly. For most of the year its traditional facades and graceful streets were a source of civic pride, but the end of October always rendered its aesthetic conventions curiously deficient. At the time, my childhood Halloweens seemed entirely adequate; I completed a satisfactory tenure as trick-or-treater, masquerading alternately as Gypsy, princess, pirate, witch and vampire.

The Soviet "spy dust" used to track American diplomats may sound like material from a James Bond movie, but the compound identified as nitrophenylpentadiene, or NPPD, actually is so simple that "you could have undergraduates prepare it in a high school lab," one national expert on such substances said Wednesday. Nicholas J.